Entrepreneurial Ingenuity and Ethics: Inspiring Innovation and Change

Scholars have highlighted that organizational ingenuity can help entrepreneurs create innovative solutions when encountering structural and resource constraints. This study focuses on entrepreneurial ingenuity, which we define as the ability to create new organizations and value within structural constraints using limited resources and imaginative problem- solving. We examine conditions that influence entrepreneurial ingenuity, centering on ethical constraints – overlooked by current literature but which can prove critical in stimulating social entrepreneurship solutions. Our qualitative analysis of social enterprises in Brazil suggests self-imposed ethical constraints can enhance both entrepreneurial ingenuity and the founder’s role as a change agent. These constraints encourage founders to solve ethical and sustainability problems through entrepreneurship and to engage stakeholders to stimulate ethical changes in their organization’s environment. This study extends the entrepreneurship literature by revealing conditions that influence entrepreneurial ingenuity when founders create new organizations and introduce change.